Live export to Middle East based on a lie

Camera IconWe don’t see sheep in the same way as we see our pets. Illustration: Don Lindsay

It was somewhere around the northern boundary of The Lodge that I encountered what a psychologist might diagnose as a mild existential moment.

It was late on Thursday. I was on my nightly walk with the family hound. We’d just traversed the length of what we call the Lodge park, on our way towards Parliament House in Canberra.

It is our nightly routine. It’s one the dog noisily insists upon and one that I happily accede to. In many ways, it is a ritual of interdependence — a sedative reprieve from the maddening complexities of our respective lives. Oh, if man only knew how taxing it was to bark and growl and snap at cockatoos all through the afternoon.

The dog had spotted a vehicle reversing from a driveway on the busy thoroughfare encircling Capital Hill. He instantly and dutifully planted his hind quarters on the footpath, sitting and waiting for my command.

Such a good dog, I thought, as he looked at me with those dewy, expectant, loyal eyes, hanging on for my direction.

There’s a car. I must sit and I must wait, those doleful doggy peepers told me.

And here comes the moment.

How we love our pets, I thought. They are just animals, but we invest so much of ourselves in their care that we sometimes mistake them for people.

As the superior primates, we are undeniably their masters and mistresses. But we are also their protectors. We love them. We look after them. And they look after us.

And then, in that brief but deep moment of emotional vulnerability, my mind skipped back to the story I had reported that night for Seven News. It was a story of confronting inhumanity, a story of the process-obsessed, rules-based system of politics colliding spectacularly with the barely thinkable brutality of man towards our fellow beasts — the live sheep trade.

We don’t see sheep in the same way as we see our pets. They are animals bred for their meat. We eat them. That makes them different. It is a convenient rationalisation to justify the different ways we treat animals. There are those we love and there are those we eat. And never the twain shall meet.

But as challenging as that opportune pretext may be, it could never justify the abject inhumanity we as a society allow to occur in the cause of economic prosperity.

Animals Australia has released shocking video of animal abuse on a live sheep export vessel to the Middle East last year. WARNING: Distressing content.

The West Australian

VideoAnimals Australia has released shocking video of animal abuse on a live sheep export vessel to the Middle East last year. WARNING: Distressing content.

What happens on those ships en route to the Middle East in the hellishly sweltering heat and fatal humidity of a northern summer is simply criminal.

Imagine if the two and a half thousand — yes, that’s right, two and a half thousand — sheep that suffered such appallingly cruel and painful deaths on board that Emanuel Exports ship, Awassi Express, from Fremantle to the Emirates last year had been humans.

It is inconceivable, even in the new abnormal of our post-September 11 reality. But suspend disbelief for a moment, if you will. What if that did happen? We’d be calling in the United Nations, the International Criminal Courts and assembling a Coalition of the Willing faster than you could say Kellogg, Brown and Root to invade the sovereign nation that allowed such indefensible brutality to occur beneath its gaze.

And it isn’t just that one extreme case. It happens to a greater or lesser degree on all ships. These vessels carry up to 70,000 live sheep at a time. Before this week, any mortality rate below 2 per cent was deemed acceptable. That is, up to 1400 deaths. That is now halved, but 700 sheep still have to die on a ship before there is an investigation.

It seems, though, that we as a nation are able to recline in the comforting knowledge that they are, after all, only sheep.

Not to farmers they’re not. I learnt this very clearly during my weekly chat on Thursday afternoon with my good friend Richard Glover on Sydney’s ABC radio.

While Richard and I were wrestling with the inadequacy of the Government’s response to livestock veterinarian Michael McCarthy’s review of the Emanuel Exports disgrace, a farmer named Bob called in to have his say.

Bob raises sheep. Merino sheep. They are normally bred for their wool, but they are in increasing demand as a meat stock because their well-fed existence these days encourages them to develop into amply fattened beasts.

“Mate, I weep when I have to sell some off,” Bob said. “It makes me cry to see them go off in a truck.

“I love my sheep. This is abhorrent! Every man, woman and child in Australia should be standing and shouting ‘til the roof comes down!”

And while we’re on the roof, we should shout about this: we are being taken for a ride. The whole premise of the Middle Eastern live export trade is based on a con.

The sheep are transported live because our Arab customers say they want to ensure the beasts are slaughtered in a way that conforms to the requirements of their halal certifications.

That is all well and good, except many of the sheep aren’t slaughtered in those customer nations at all. Many — although no one seems to know just how many — are put into feedlots to recover from their transportation ordeals and fattened up ready for resale.

After a couple of months, they are placed on the Middle Eastern market to be sold at massive profits to third countries, where they are slaughtered and marketed as meat.

We are being played off a break by capitalist opportunists.

How do I know this? Because two Cabinet ministers confided in me this week that this is what happened and lamented that there was bugger all they could do about it. Australian law does not enjoy the sort of extra-territoriality that would allow the Government to regulate against this practice.

So what’s the answer?

Well, we could ban the trade altogether and become a nation of vegans but that is unlikely.

Or we could tell our Middle Eastern customers that the risk of multiple fatalities in transit, regardless of regulation, is too great for a nation of the moral bearing of Australia to accept.

We could offer to replace the live trade with an equal supply of meat, humanely slaughtered under halal certified supervision here in Australia, packaged, refrigerated and transported to them at competitive prices.

And if they don’t like that, they can source their meat elsewhere. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and all the requisite ministers could then work hard to compensate for the loss of that business by expanding trade opportunities in the rich developing markets of Asia, South America and beyond.

This is all that I was able to come up with during a brief existential moment on a 20-minute walk with my four-legged mate on a chilly Canberra night. But maybe it’s something worth thinking about. If only for decency’s sake.